What Did British Honduras Going to Play Again After Years
New Majuscule for British Honduras—Almost
Run across the article in its original context from
January 27, 1973
,
Page
ixBuy Reprints
TimesMachine is an sectional benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Annal
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times'due south print annal, before the starting time of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; nosotros are continuing to piece of work to amend these archived versions.
BELMOPAN, British Honduras, Jan. 26 — It is clear that Belmopan won't be built in a day, and then the little things are important in this settlement hacked out of the jungle a few years ago —things that tell of, the nascence of a urban center and a new capital.
For example:
¶In less than a calendar month the $ninety,000 Belmopan of Cinema, complete with electric fans and 487 seats, volition open its doors with "The Godfather." Information technology replaces a combination cinema vegetable market place.
The Talk Belmopan
A service‐station operator, Lyle Hulse, says he is inclined to seek the franchise for Belmopan's outset station, although he concedes that information technology will probably lose coin at first, with sales projected at merely 3,000 gallons a month.
¶ Belmopan will have a 12‐room hotel, Louis A. Espat, who is generally thought of as the nigh successful businessman in boondocks, says he plans a $190,000 edifice that will be ready for at least limited occupancy past the end of the yr. "It will be American‐mode," he said, "with a swimming pool and air‐workout.
Neighbors Are Confused
With all this, Belmopan has problems.
It is a lamentable truth that much of the globe does not know where Belmopan is; it does not even know where British Republic of honduras is.
A reporter who tried to call Belize recently, from Mexico City kept encountering Mexican telephone operators who bad never heard the proper noun, though British Honduras is a neighbor. Informed that Belize and British Honduras, were the same, they rang up Honduras, which has no relationship to British Honduras except location in Central America. A confused operator in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, did not seem to know where British Honduras is either.
British Honduras, bounded by Mexico on the north and Guatemala on the westward and south and the Caribbean on the e, has a population estimated at 125,000 in an area of 8,867 square miles—slightly larger than Massachusetts—which makes information technology the least densely populated territory in Key America likewise as the smallest in numbers.
British Aiding Project
Small-scale though it may be, the colony—its currency calls information technology British Honduras simply nationalists call information technology Belize—is a tale of two cities. I is Belmopan, new, inspired by Mayan architecture, with adept water and a modernistic sewer system. The other is Belize, old, inspired by non much of anything identifiable, with bad h2o and a sewer system that flows in open cuts to assault the nostrils and pollute the sea.
Belmopan, with its houses of stone set amid rolling hills twoscore miles from Belize, was established largely because the old capital had been hit by hurricane afterward hurricane—in recent years in 1931, 1955, 1961, 1969 and 1971.
The 1961 hurricane devastated Belize. George C. Cost, the Premier of this semiautonomous colony, was instrumental in convincing London that a new majuscule had to be built. With British financial assist, work began in the late nineteen‐sixties and the first families arrived in 1970. The permanent population is near 3.000.
Belmopan may not be a unique capital city, but it may well be the only 1 in which the caput of government resides in a 20‐by‐20‐foot concrete, blockhouse and tin can be seen headed for communion at six A.M. daily, stopping frequently to pick up litter earlier reaching the priest's veranda where the sacrament is administered.
Nor can Premier Price be accused of the excesses often associated with heads of neighboring countries, for his annual salary is less than $7,000.
The overwhelming impression. Belmopan gives is institutional. It looks similar the campus of a state instructor's college that was designed past a Mayan architect. Close upwardly, the Mayan‐inspired design and the concrete‐block structure are reminiscent of an urban‐renewal project in the United States.
The well‐ventilated build ings are surprisingly cool, fifty-fifty on the hottest of days, and air‐workout is apparently unnecessary despite the tropical climate.
It is not just compages that makes Belmopan what it is. It is identifiable also by what information technology is not.
Courtroom but No Judge
There is a courtroom in Belmopan but it has no guess. No jury has ever sat in information technology for the, uncomplicated reason that the capital has had virtually 'no recorded offense. Relentlessly middle form, information technology is a city of ceremonious servants. There are no slums, no unemployment, no urban congestion. There seem to exist no vices, which appears to he the residents' major complaint against it.
Downwardly by the sea in the onetime uppercase, which has a population of more than xl,000, onetime frame houses flinch under a hot sunday and people of every hue throng the streets. Around a corner one encounters an ornate wooden cornice or a heavy wrought‐atomic number 26 balustrade. In that location are piddling shops and large ones, drinking spots of every description and a proffer of British colonial rule, including a fine cricket field.
Above all there is a feeling of fourth dimension, a feeling that this is a identify where many people have lived, every bit they take since the 17th century. Small-scale though it is, it is a existent city, with a real city's pleasures and disappointments.
Some civil servants, refusing to move despite the hurricane threat, commute to Belmopan every day. Asked why, they talk vaguely nearly relatives or the shopping.
Mrs. Kathleen Tillett, the wife of Edmund Tillett, Assistant Secretary of the Ministry of Pedagogy, Hous ing and Labor, says that she is growing to like Belmopan more and more. "It is like perpetual honeymoon," she explained, locking out at the rolling, verdant hills. But on weekends the Tilletts go to Belize.
A taxi driver, Donald Gill, said: "I could never go out Confute city, at least not for Belmopan. I don't know, why —I suppose it is the body of water. If I lived in Belmopan I could not see it, I would experience too much surrounded past the land. No, I must stay in Belize city."
Ten miles from the old capital is the last British garrison in the New World, Airport Camp, a vestige of what was one time a powerful colonial empire. Every morn the dark-green, orange and golden colors of the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment flutter in the humid breeze and in that location is a odor of java, porridge and eggs.
Later the large English breakfast is over, men smartly turned out in berets, shorts and genu socks go about the business organization of soldiering amidst the not bad prefabricated buildings of green and grey.
The proper name of the base of operations does not sound like anything to inspire, say, a Lawrence of Arabia. It does not take the band of Khartoum or of the Crimea and the Thin Red Line; not even Kipling could find a Gungad Din.
No ramparts hither, no desperate men, hopelessly outnumbered, waiting for the Nabob to attack. Just the members of the band accept pith helmets. The 590 soldiers serving Her Majesty are pretty much left to decide whether to use the swimming pool, or the squash or lawn tennis courts, or the advisedly tended playing fields.
Reason Why: Guatemala
Nonetheless, there is a very real reason for the garrison, and information technology is to be found 400 miles to the west, in Republic of guatemala Metropolis. No map there shows British Honduras or the split up nation called Belize.
The Guatemalans, citing voluminous data from the Spanish conquest, maintain that Belize should be role of Guatemala. The British, they fence, lost their rights by declining to comply with Article 7 of a 1959 treaty in which they agreed to build a route that would give Republic of guatemala access to the sea in the north.
United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland — never ane to be rushed — finished something of a route to the border in 1948, but that did not satisfy the Guatemalans, who have conspicuously indicated that if the garrison is disbanded, their regular army will march.
British Honduras waits Settled by shipwrecked English buccaneers in 1638—so the archives say — and by slaves who worked for logging men, information technology is used to turbulence. The Guatemalans and the British have had no formal diplomatic relations since 1963, when Guatemala broke them, and there are no talks to restore them. The British Governor, Richard N. posnett, insists that London has no intention of pulling out, and Premier Cost says his people desire the garrison to remain. They want total independence and the British want to give it to them, simply not at the risk of a Guatemalan attack.
A year ago the British, giving credence to rumors that Guatemala was planning to mountain an invasion, added 350 men to the force.
Col. J. N. Shipster, Airport Campsite'south commander, says that British Republic of honduras, with its hot, sticky jungles and prodigious numbers of mosquitoes, gnats and sandflies, "offers marvelous facilities for preparation." Withal, he keeps his men, who seem less enthusiastic most the grooming, away from the Guatemalan border.
The soldiers appear to conform to the tradition described by Kipling — "single men in billet don't grow into plaster saints"—in their visits to such noted Belize establishments as the Double Butt, the Queen of Hearts and the Continental.
The Queen of Hearts is off limits because regimental officers noted that enlisted men who went there seemed to have, a high incidence of crabs disease. At the Continental, which was off limits for the same reason but was recently taken off the forhidden list, the men get together under psychedelic lights, listen to a rock group that is loud even by 1973 standards and pay their respects to some of the local women.
There is at to the lowest degree i soldier who likes Airdrome Camp Lance Cpl. Tony Kandes, a paratrooper assigned every bit the camp commander's driver. A frequent company to Belize, he is said to know every pretty girl within driving distance. "It's ameliorate than Belfast, I can tell you that," he said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/27/archives/new-capital-for-british-hondurasalmost-neighbors-are-confused.html
Post a Comment for "What Did British Honduras Going to Play Again After Years"